Landscape software design

[Antonio Agudo]

I am a profesional landscape designer looking for a program to design
landscapes & gardens. It must be able to import photos, design plant
symbols, etc.

I would appreciate it if somebody could tell me what is out there and where
to get it or where to order it from.

Sincerely yours,
Antonio Agudo

[Michael Risso]

Antonio Agudo wrote:

Dear Antonio,

I use Site designer, autaocad 14 and also Land designer pro. I am not really
happy with either of them. When you find one you like let me know.

Michael

[Michael Risso]

[MUSKRATMAN]

I've been using Raincad for about 2 years now and I'm mostly happy with it.
It's main Function is for irrigation design and the standard 5.0 version does
just that. If you get the suite version however, it has full modules for
landscape design, low voltage lighting, and drainage capabilities. The
landscape design portion can support a database of up to 6,000 plants each with
different sizes for auto-radius purposes ( i.e. 1 gallon, 5 gallon, 2-3 years
etc.). It doesn't have a function to "grow the landscape out". You have to go
in and resize the individual plant material. A real chore for commercial jobs,
but not too bad on the residential scale. The database comes pretty much empty
and that makes sense, I live in the Phoenix area. Ever try to grow Yucca
brevifolia in Minnisota? It takes time to build a good plant database but it's
fairly easy. You can also organize them into palettes ( i.e. south exposure,
north exposure etc.) You can import bitmaps but not jpegs or anything like that
for plant pictures. Programs like Paintshop pro and Microsoft publisher can do
a better job for presentations than any cad program anyway. The irrigation
portion works really well but I wouldn't recomend using the pipe auto-draw
feature unless you want to dig seperate trenches for all your laterals! You can
reach them on the web at: www.landscapesoftware.com or:
irrigationsoftware.com. One more note, this used to be marketed through
Rainbird but they've seperated now. As a former Rainbird technical services
employee, I had heard that Software Republic's (formerly TKO) technical support
wasn't really up to snuff. I've had little or no problem with the software, it
seems to be really stable. They used to mail out free demo disks that wouldn't
let you design anything but does walk though an entire design to give a good
picture of all the functions.